(15 hours on a bus to) Vientiane

Yes, seriously, 15 hours. It should have been 10, but as we soon came to learn timetables are a flexible thing when travelling in Laos! The bus journey was a mixture of eye-opening, educational and a total nightmare – particularly when 11 hours in your husband is moaning more than the kids are!

Along the way we would suddenly stop in the middle of the road  for an hour or more with no explanation (although I’m sure we could have got one if our Lao had been a bit more fluent than zero!). The second time we stopped, and as we were nearer the front of the queue, we discovered that it was simply due to roadworks, but not roadworks as we know them. The standstill was caused by  piles of earth several meters high literally blocking the entire road and there was no option but to  wait patiently until the workers had finished moving it with the bulldozer so that we could pass. No-one seemed stressed out about it, it was all taken with a pinch of salt, so we just rolled with it.

 

We eventually arrived at the Vientiane bus station, five hours later than planned, to be slightly overwhelmed by a rush of tuk-tuk drivers vying to take the diverse array of people on the bus to their various destinations. We weighed up our options, waited for the throng to die down a bit, negotiated our price (we’re getting pretty good at that now) and got on one of the truck-tuks to take us through the streets of Vientiane in the dark. At this point, if I’m honest, we were not 100% certain we would end up where we wanted to go, but in all the random tuk-tuk journeys we had taken thus far we hadn’t been let down yet, so statistics were on our side. Lo and behold, 20 minutes later we were dropped right at the door of our hostel. Oh ye of little faith…

So, here we were in Vientiane. The capital of Laos. I had been the one to insist on coming to Vientiane, having read about the history, the French influence, the bakeries, the coffee shop culture and laid back approach to life. My imagination had painted me a very vivid picture of the town and I didn’t want to miss out on the country’s capital. If I’m honest, for me, this was the first place on our trip where I can say that the initial reality did not live up to expectation. I think Mark and Mim of the Common Wanderer summed it up with the opening line of their Vientiane blog post “Vientiane is one of the most beautiful cities in the world” – said pretty much no one ever”…if only I’d read that before we went I might have been less underwhelmed!

Watching a film in the hostel!

But, don’t let first impressions deceive you – that didn’t mean we didn’t enjoy our time in Vientiane. It’s a small city for a capital and so pretty easy to get around. We had a cool little hostel almost bang in the centre of the historic old quarter and still just a few hundred metres from the Mekong river. There was a great little coffee shop with just as good cakes opposite our hostel, that in our week there became a regular stop for Ice coffees and pastries.

We hired two tandems for a day and did a cycle tour of the town (route published in the lonely planet if I remember rightly). The tandems were excellent fun and in just a few hours, combined with my superb navigational skills (eh hem), we had visited all the main monuments / attractions of Vientiane, including the Presidential palace, the Australian embassy building, the Chao Anouvong Park and an array of temples.

The Presidential Palace

During our stay we both cycled and walked up the main boulevard from the Presidential palace, reminiscent of the Paris’ Champs Elysee, to the Patuxai Victory Monument that sits at its end. The impressive monument is modelled on the French capital’s Arc de Triomphe, but with a Lao twist, slightly ironic when you consider it was built to commemorate the Lao people who fought and died in the battle for independence against the French. The detailed, very oriental arch ceilings are beautiful.

The Patuxai park was just beyond it, with neat lawns and impressive fountains. It was here as we were sitting in the shade taking everything in on one of the days that we had a really interesting chance meeting with two young buddhist monk novices. They were so friendly and full of enthusiasm. Wanting to practice their English, we all sat and chatted for about half an hour before they asked us for photos, and vice versa, and then they went off back to their temple, leaving us with big smiles on our faces.

We visited the night market several times, which, unlike the tourist market of Luang Prabang, really is a local market, giving you a far more authentic experience of day to day Lao living. It was absolute bedlam, full of clothes, electronics and mobile phone covers as well as food stalls, where we tried lots of new foods, including our first introduction to pure sugar cane juice (sugar rush alert!) and parathas, a kind of Indian influence pancake that take some skill to make and then can be filled with a variety of savoury or sweet fillings.

We strolled the promenade in the evening and watched the sunset over the Mekong. The promenade was buzzing with activity and we were particularly entertained by the 70+ year old man with no co-ordination joining in the late night river front aerobics class. We were astonished by the parking…we had never seen so many scooters in one place in our lives (we hadn’t yet been to Vietnam!)

We could have done even more in Vientiane if we’d had the time and the inclination. This at first underwhelming, compact city has more to offer than you think if you’re prepared to scratch the surface…